It's not the IRS investigation of a small number of local Tea Party affiliated organization (which got more attention from Congress than the wiretapping of journalists). It's not the revelation that the NSA has been sweeping up all sorts of data, our telephone records and who knows what else? It's scandalous that we get upset about the NSA's data collection but freely give our private information to Bing, Facebook, Google, Twitter and many other for profit internet companies.
In a new book, Who Owns The Future?, Jaron Lanier, one of the architects of many aspects of today's high tech world, offers some profound thoughts on where the internet economy is taking us. He believes, and convincingly argues, that our economic woes increasingly trace back to the evolution of systems that value data highly in one context and not at all in another.
For example, Google offers you free searches, but it also remembers every search, as well as everything you type on a Google site or in a Google app. It then uses that data to sell advertising. (Of course, that data is also available to the NSA and other government agencies when ordered by a special court.) You get some value out of the free search, or the free app, but Google gets more value by using your data to sell advertising to a variety of businesses. It also uses your history to target ads based on your previous searches.
Most of us either don't mind this, or don't think about it at all, but somehow when the government is revealed to be collecting similar information about us, that seems sinister and a violation of our rights. It is often enough a rights violation but is it not also a violation of our rights when an Internet company makes a profit using data we might not even know we are providing it? Lanier argues that the shrinking of the middle class is a direct result of this feature of the internet.
Key to Lanier's concerns and proposed remedy is a basic premise of Roman Catholic social teaching: each and every human being is valuable in herself and possesses inalienable dignity. The dignity of the human person has been under assault for decades, not only from dictators, the military-industrial complex, and corporations that prioritize profits for the few over the common good but also from innovative engineers who create the communications and information technologies upon which we currently rely to keep up with family and friends, to find work, to research anything for every purpose, and to entertain ourselves. Think about it, and then consider whether you really need to tweet that opinion or post that photo on Facebook.
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